Archive for September 2011

There’s been a lot of articles written about this, but there are a lot of people who ignore some very important details.

I’ve worked at enough startups to know the drill: get something out the door quickly, get feedback, repeat. But great startups only succeed when they have great teams.

They work when people are dedicated to an end goal: a great idea executed well. So many things can go wrong because startups are supposed to be risky. How well your team works together is only one part of the equation. If they don’t work together well, they’re bound to fail. That means you have to be part of the team.

No one person in a startup is more important any other; if someone acts this way, they stand out like a sore thumb.

If you want to be a startup junkie, here’s a few tips I’ll hand out for free.

Work like it’s your own money.

I used to work for a consultancy, and the owner once said, “When I see everyone walking around, I see dollar signs over their head of how much they are costing me.” After that moment, I had a spreadsheet where I could see everyone’s salary; and I knew exactly what day of the month they went profitable. That made him very, very happy.

If you’re working at a startup, look at the people around you. Figure out how much they are probably costing.

Ask yourself, “Who’s paying for all of this?” It’s probably not you.

Investment dollars were made off the hard work of someone else. You’re depending on Angel investors or a VC firm. Everything takes away from that — the $5,000 coffee machine, the free cokes, the team outings to Great America. Morale is great, but that all costs money. Every decision contributes to the bottom line (or lack there of). Every dollar saved contributes to a longer runway.

Figure out how you contribute to the bottom line and act accordingly. Look at the process and see how you can improve it instead of increasing headcount. No company needs a team of designers or front end engineers if there’s a solid foundation for doing work. Work together to make it work smoother.

Every decision counts. Don’t do them alone.

The cool thing about startups is that everyone generally gets to either work together, or has close communication channels. You can get co-workers to come over to your desk or on Skype and ask them, “What do you think of this?” before executing the idea.

Any party in a startup that goes off and builds a feature alone doesn’t understand that most great products come from great teams. Apple might have one Steve Jobs, but they also have people like Jonathan Ive and other designers that tirelessly re-hash ideas to make sure they haven’t missed anything in designing a product.

Show your work to everyone and collect feedback. That’s why startups have open environments — to encourage communication and collaboration.

Don’t be a gatekeeper.

I’ve worked at a few places where there was one person that controlled access to too many things. One place, I couldn’t so much as install an instant messenger without a blood sample, note from my mom, and a notarized form. In good situations, gatekeepers provide checks and balances. In bad situations, they are dictators that can kill a startup with their self-righteous ways.

Gatekeepers take all forms: system administrators that hold you hostage, developers that won’t develop features without spec’ing them out in triplicate, designers that move things “just because.” All can be detrimental to an environment.

Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you are the only opinion. If you are the sole person blocking something, not only do you have too much power, you are blocking a collaborative environment and could potentially kill a startup.

Don’t be an idiot.

Weak links stand out like sore thumbs in startup environments. They’re the ones that don’t want to collaborate, that think they’re ideas are vastly superior, that are roadblocks to getting things done. They insist on doing things their own way when they actually cost the company time and money. They don’t act like they’re part of the team.

Don’t be an asshole — a team should work toward a common goal. Treat someone like you want to be treated.

You don’t own the work. Remember, it’s not your money (see above). It’s not for your portfolio. It’s for the livelihood of the other 10 to 50 people with whom you are working. They have rents, mortgages and car payments. If you’re an asshole, there’s a good chance someone’s going to miss a car payment because of your selfish actions.

When the culture isn’t a fit and you can’t commit to working with people, go somewhere else. It’s a much better situation for everyone involved.

Make mistakes for the right reasons.

Startups make all kinds of mistakes: bad platform decisions, wrong markets to target, wrong people to hire. The best one’s succeed, in spite of themselves.

We’ll take MySpace, for example. The original version of MySpace was built on the Cold Fusion platform in ten days and survived well. The original mistake was building it on Cold Fusion. It’s a platform that doesn’t scale, but they made the decision for the right reasons: it’s a platform that’s easy to learn and great for elaborate proof of concepts.

The second mistake was bad. Someone should have said, “Ya know, we really have to plan for the future.”

No one ever did.

The initial mistake didn’t harm MySpace early on; and in the end, it was able to scale the platform to a point where NewsCorp bought it for $580 million. The fatal mistake was planning for a migration when traffic spiked or to allow them more flexibility in product design. While .NET and Cold Fusion were initially blamed, it’s really management’s fault for not planning ahead.

Mistakes are okay, if you have contingency plans. Strategize accordingly and plan to correct them as soon as possible.

Take ownership.

When you’re working for a startup, the organization is fairly flat: there’s a good chance that the CEO is going to be emptying the trashcan and vacuuming the place. That said, you have to realize that you are building something really cool; and that means having an impact now and for years to come.

That means it’s not a McJob.

Take ownership and pride in everything you do. Spend an extra hour cleaning up some HTML and making the user experience that much better. Proofread the marketing copy. Clean up your desk. Learn another job so you can help someone else.

It also means owning up to your mistakes. If there’s something that didn’t work out the way that you want, or something was rushed out, it’s okay to say, “My Fault.” Taking ownership means preventing the same issue from happening again.

People should take personal responsibility in the greater goal. While it may not be your money, you are so much more of a part of the company than working at somewhere larger like eBay. Act accordingly.

I posted this over on Quora too. It’ll be interesting to see what responses we’ll get.

We’re starting the see the usual cracks in a tech boom where startups are living high on someone else’s money. Evaluating potential opportunities carefully is important especially because of the volatility of our current economy — not all of us are lucky to have great paying jobs.

I’ve seen this dance before. Most of us User Experience types had to do something else after 2000 — I played a programmer on television for a while). Some of the kids I’ve seen running around at the meetups here in San Francisco, not so. I personally don’t want to see another geo-located photosharing app until they have solved the revenue piece.

Now, I go out of my way to make sure wherever I work is a sound idea, if it’s not the equivalent of shipping a 50 pound of dog food cross country for free.

Where I’m working at now, Jobvite, has a great business model — someday I’ll educate you on the advantages of SaaS, and why SalesForce.com has a license to print money. I’ve also turned down other opportunities that were boring, but very, very profitable.

This begs the question — when a designer joins a startup other than own (and maybe especially their own), what should that designer be asking?

Here are the questions I always have:

Who’s funding it? (Some of the larger VC firms may not always be the best sign.)

Websites let your customers access your products and services, but as a side effect, they also access your corporate values. If your website is clumsy or slick, easy or confusing, it tells them a story.

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If a company has a difficult or confusing website, it can mean that they have a confusing organizational structure.

If a company has hard to use software, it can indicate that there are several politically charged constituencies within the company and each is advocating conflicting requirements.

If a client's website is unfocused, full of unnecessary features, and it forces users to enter superfluous information, it can mean that they are unclear on who their users are and have a corporate structure incapable of serving those users well.

Software has become like body language in the way it reveals your inner personality to a patient observer. Your body language always tells the truth, even when you are trying to hide an ugly secret, and it will give you away every time. You simply can't create likable software if you are a dysfunctional company.

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If you want to improve the quality of your website, app, or software, you need to also improve the quality of your organization. … You need to eliminate the energy drains, systemic distortions, and toxic people that force others to act like corporate drones instead of like entrepreneurs with a vested interest in success.

A lot of the things we read about usability and UX in regards to web-design can be applied to offline situations and business. Of course the opposite is also true-things we learn offline can be applied online.

On my own sites, I spend time analyzing traffic, audience, click through rates, page views, ad placements, search engine rankings and a bunch of other things, and I try to provide my users with a great experience (hopefully). Needless to say I'm amazed when I walk into a store or a restaurant and think that they must not care about their customers. Sometimes I can't help but wonder how come the store I just walked in is still in business.

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Lesson #1: If you need to add unnecessary visual cues in order for your users to find their way around, you should probably rethink the whole thing. Especially if those visual cues prove to be ineffective. Your users are not stupid.

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Lesson #2: Make sure customers are happier when they leave then they were before coming into your store. If you can achieve that, they'll come back. Same goes for the web.

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Lesson #3: Plan ahead! Make sure it's easy to scale and try to fix problems before they even occur. There is always room for improvement. Always be on the lookout for simple and inexpensive things you can do to provide a better user experience.

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Lesson #4: If you don’t care about your users, they won’t care about you.

If Architects Had To Work Like Web DesignersDear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms.

But I was there with now my ex-girlfriend before and after, and vividly remember each experience.

We had visited the World Trade Center in November 2000 as part of a vacation.

I remember how vast the place was: looking up and not being able to see the top of the buildings. Ironically one of the photos we took looks a lot like the hoax photo that floats around periodically. We walked around the shopping center underneath the towers.

I still have the full size station map of the New York Subway system framed, on the wall. It’s pre-9/11, so it’s missing a few lines and has a few stations that no longer exist.

We went back a few years later, and I remember how sad visiting Ground Zero was.

It just a big empty hole in the ground. It was a very solemn space, people peering through the chain link fences to a what was a construction site.

We went at the start of the Iraq War, and the scenes of National Guard patrolling JFK with semi-automatic rifles drawn was a common sight then. The city seemed on edge, wondering what risks the war would bring.

That day I was driving to work when I heard the news.

By the time I turned on the radio, the towers were down. I had to pull over for a few minutes just to realize the seriousness of it all.

We had to solve issues at work like “how do we stop at the timed transactions that depend on shipments” and “what do we do about deliveries to Manhattan?” Not the problems that some of my friends had — one friend’s father works in the reinsurance industry, and lost friends — but still situations nonetheless.

I ended up helping with a message board that I helped run during that time, because most of the people on the board lived in New York City. They had a hard time getting information out because WTC had a lot of main trunk lines going through it. They were a news source in a time that needed.

Looking back, I don’t think we have learned enough. We focus way too much on our own tragedies.

We should remember 9/11 but we also should remember their are vents that affect the lives of many more people. Our evening news is too often concerned with the person who was killed down the street when we forget about the 200 who died in bombings in other countries.

We need to put 9/11 in perspective so it can find it’s proper place in world history.

The longer we think we are the center are the world, the more risk we are to repeat 9/11.